I grew up on the other side of the internet. When I tell people this, they don't quite understand what that really means. The best way for me to explain it is that while others were watching content on YouTube, I was creating it. I was only 11 when I started my YouTube channel, and I made videos for about 6 years on and off. I saw it as a creative outlet where I could be anyone I wanted, rather than a place just to watch cat videos. No one really understood what being a "YouTuber" was, but I promise you it is a lot different than you would think.

What some people don't know about YouTube, or didn't know up until about 2013, is that there are thousands of smaller communities of YouTubers that know each other based on the type content that they make. The community I was apart of was a growing population of awkward tweens and teens that made skits, lip-sync music videos, and vlogs. This community was formed around 2009. I didn't know who was watching my videos when I first started uploading them. I assumed it was my parents and some of my friends from school. But then I was beginning to get views in the hundreds and then later in the thousands. Soon I found the community I was initially becoming apart of. We all collaborated together, group video chatted every night, and some of us even met each other in person. By the time I turned 14, I had already reached over 1000 subscribers who were mostly people apart of this community. However there was a hidden dark side at the time that changed the community forever.

With any type of social media, you can expect there to be cyberbullying, hate comments, and even some creepy stalkers. However it was on a much larger scale in some of these YouTube communities. There were bullies, but nothing like you saw in middle school. These bullies would tell people to kill themselves, or to hurt themselves, or that they were completely useless human beings. I was not used to seeing this kind of hate, not always on my videos, but on many of my friend's content. There was one girl in our community that everyone knew. For the sake of this piece, I will call her "J." J was one of the biggest bullies I knew, but was also bullied on the internet, at school, and from what she told us, at home. She had suicidal and self-harm tendencies, something I had never been exposed to before digging into the internet. Despite this, she was also one of the ones who told people to kill themselves on a daily basis. I always thought that since so many people said it to her, it came natural to her to say it back. Soon, these "tendencies" became the norm with so many people. This extremely dangerous form of bullying was everywhere and some people felt like there was no escape. There was a night that J tried to commit suicide on a live video chat with over 100 people watching and pleading with her not to do it. Fortunately, the police had made it to her house to save her, and took her to the hospital. J was safe, but this really shifted the community in a negative direction. Our growing YouTube community diminished a few years after the incident with J. We never truly were the same, and people began to stop making videos. The community no longer exists anymore, and some people who faced a lot of the bullying, like J, still are still getting backlash from it years later.

This was the other side of the internet. A place where I was exposed to things that not many people were exposed to. This wasn't something we were seeing in schools at the time. It was dark, scary, and very dangerous. Being apart of something like this in middle school forced me to grow up very fast. I had to learn how to deal with these dangerous and triggering images that I saw almost every day. Something like this makes your maturity grow on an entirely different level than others. I learned how to and how not to treat people, especially when it came to social media. YouTube taught me that not everyone is going to like you, and that some people will hate you just because they have nothing better to do. Although a lot of my experiences were negative, I am very fortunate to have had many positive ones as well. Growing up on the other side of the internet made me grow up faster than others, but the experiences and lessons I learned were completely worth it. How weird is it to say I am who I am today, because of YouTube.